Here's my take on everything that was discussed:
I want to make brokering more competitive, so these are the changes I am considering. Some of them may seem like a stick, but they are really just things I wanted to add anyways:
- Implement rot for food on the market - this should be done anyways because otherwise putting food on the market on a deal you don't expect anyone to accept is a way to save food from rotting. The amount of rot would depend on a "virtual time", representing travel time for food, which will NOT be added, i.e. trading remains instant, but we simulate the travel time of the food through rot. In other words: The further away your trade partner, the more food will be lost in transit.
Brokered deals will have dramatically reduced rot. Either half or even none at all. Since only traders can broker... - 48 hours delay for offers to become available for trading, but they are available for brokering immediately. This represents the time delay of moving food around first to the market place and then to the recipient vs. sending it from the one to the other directly via a broker.
- I'm thinking about some advantage for unrestricted offers, but haven't yet come up with something good. But I want to encourage people on that. The only idea I have this far is to make the black market simply a copy of the regular market with all restrictions lifted. If restricted traders aren't 100% safe, I believe more people wouldn't bother to restrict them.
- We need automatic offers, on the old system of "if stockpile > x then put y bushels on the market for z gold" resp. "if stockpile < x then post an offer for y bushels for z gold". It needs a bit of work to integrate it with the new tax system and all, but it can work (bonds required could be taken from the tax collection, bonds gained would be added to the tax income).
